


Fire and Embers

by mixtapesandsunsets



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, MSR, One Shot, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 08:30:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 939
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8320951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mixtapesandsunsets/pseuds/mixtapesandsunsets
Summary: Based on prompt "Imagine person A reading a poem they’ve written about B to them while they’re asleep. Only B isn’t really sleeping." MSR.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I found this prompt on Tumblr at otpblr.tumblr.com. The poem is from Stephen King's "It". I truly don't know why, and I don't really want to analyze the fact that this is the first thing I thought of when I read this prompt. Regardless, I hope you enjoy.

Mulder watched Scully sleep peacefully on her uncomfortable motel bed. Stuck in another musty room in another dead end town. All for him. He couldn’t believe the bullshit she had been through since she joined him on the x-files, and still she was willing to pursue the truth. Much more cautiously than he, maybe, but she was pursuing it nonetheless.

As always, the connecting door to their rooms was unlocked from both ends, in case of emergency. And as always, he didn’t wait for an emergency to take advantage of it. He slipped through, planning to ask her a question about an autopsy she performed, ignoring the voice in his head, her voice if he listened closely, that was telling him _it could wait until the morning Mulder, it’s after midnight._

 

When his eyes adjusted to the darkness, however, she was sound asleep. He smiled at her, basking in the simple glory that was Dana Scully at her most vulnerable. He perched silently on the edge of her bed, knowing this was strange, suspecting she’d shoot him if she knew, but he couldn’t help it. She was a work of art, his greatest inspiration.

 

She had inspired him to work harder, to analyze more carefully, to be a better Fox Mulder. On a less profound level, she made him write. Scully caused the parts of him that he thought were abducted along with his baby sister when he was young spring back to life, making him desperate to have a tangible record of his love for her. 

 

The fact that he loved her was not as surprising to him as he expected it to be. He supposed that it had something to do with the walls she had broken down almost effortlessly. That first night in Bellefleur, stroking the skin of her lower back under the light of a single candle while she shivered in his motel room, scared half to death, was the beginning of his new era: his renaissance. 

 

That night, as he leaned against his own stiff bed, occupied by Scully, he found himself pouring out his story to her. He knew there was still a chance she was working against him; realistically, he knew it very well, but he couldn’t find it in himself to care when he looked up to see her forget-me-not blue eyes looking into his with a mixture of concern and care. She reached out to squeeze his shoulder, and he was gone.  _ Time is a universal invariant. _

 

But that was then, this is now. Different town, different motel, same endless pursuit of the truth. The truth that always seemed to evade them. Same shit, different day.

 

Mulder sighed, admiring how the red of her hair took on an ethereal glow in the moonlight coming from the dirty window next to her bed. Fire.

 

This brought to the surface another image of Scully, preserved forever by his eidetic memory. An image of Scully walking ahead of him in the snow, hair bright as it flowed around her head when she turned to smile at him. Her beauty rendered him speechless, he could only write. So that’s what he did. 

 

Later that day, sitting in a tiny cafe in New Hampshire, he took advantage of Scully’s departure to the ladies’ room to scribble on a napkin:

 

_ Your hair is winter fire, January embers. My heart burns there too. _

 

It was over almost before it started, napkin shoved haphazardly in his pocket as he awaited the return of his muse to their piece of small-town paradise.

 

Over half a year later, he finds himself murmuring these words to her sleeping form, the first time he had spoken them out loud. He is about to reach out to brush back a stray lock of her fiery hair when her eyes open, effectively freezing him.

 

“Mulder?” she mumbled. Her voice was sleepy, but not sleepy enough to have been actually unconscious just before this. Mulder should know, his phone calls had awaken her enough times in the night to make him very familiar with the voice of a half-asleep Dana Scully.

 

“Hi.” Mulder replied softly. “Sorry. I thought you were asleep.”

 

“What was that poem?”

 

_ Shit.  _ “I.. what poem?”

 

“The one you were reciting. I can’t just pretend I didn’t hear it.”

 

“It’s just something I wrote.”

 

Scully’s eyes widened. “You wrote that, Mulder?”

 

He laughed, embarrassed. “Yeah. You kind of inspire me.”

 

She sat up. “Wait. You wrote that about  _ me? _ ” she asked incredulously.

 

Mulder rubbed a hand self-consciously over the back of his neck. “..yes.”

 

“And you’re in my room, in the middle of the night, reading this poem to me while you thought I was asleep.”

 

“Yeah. Sorry Scully.”

 

To Mulder’s surprise, she started to laugh. A deep belly laugh that he rarely had the opportunity to hear come from his partner. Under any other circumstance it would have made his day. Now however, it just made his stomach clench in embarrassment. He began to move away.

 

Scully reached out, grabbing his hand. “No, stay, it’s not, Mulder I just,” she gasped between bits of laughter. She took a deep breath and tried to control herself. “I just can’t believe that you snuck into my room at 1 am to recite your poetry to me while I was sleeping, you big sap.  I would have been happy to listen in the day time.”

 

He smiled hopefully. “Really? Because there’s more. I’m kind of really into you, Scully.”

 

She laughed, shaking her head. “Come here,” she said, pulling him into a kiss. 

  
And with that, his renaissance ended, and their golden age began.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, feel free let me know what you think. Have a good day!


End file.
